


Between One Heartbeat and the Next: The Liminal State of Clara Oswald [2/2]

by impossiblyeclecticduck (3ImpossiblyEclecticDuck6), Radiolaria



Series: Doctor Who (2005 - 2017) Meta [5]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Fanwork Research & Reference Guides, Gen, Meta, Other, Steven Moffat Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-04
Updated: 2018-12-04
Packaged: 2019-09-07 05:32:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16848094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/3ImpossiblyEclecticDuck6/pseuds/impossiblyeclecticduck, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Radiolaria/pseuds/Radiolaria
Summary: Meta inspired by meta written by a friend who has always hugely inspired and supported me, and her groundbreaking ideas on Clara Oswald.





	Between One Heartbeat and the Next: The Liminal State of Clara Oswald [2/2]

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Radiolaria](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Radiolaria/gifts).



> Possibly the first meta I wrote for Doctor Who, first published on my Tumblr blog on January 11, 2016. I remember how the writing process was; in one word, excruciating. I'm not as proud of it as I once was, I think it could be vastly improved, and its not the style I would use to write meta again. But I want to preserve it nonetheless, for the sake of history.
> 
> The content is practically the exact thing I first posted, and copy-pasted here.

[This is a discussion of [@onaperduamedee](http://tmblr.co/mg-VDmabjrgSm4noAbskbKg)‘s ideas about the symbolism associated with Clara Oswald in Series 7 and how they apply to her characterisation in Series 8 and 9. The original posts are here: [part 1](http://onaperduamedee.tumblr.com/post/79571132099/meta-clara-boxed-girl-part-1-intro-and-of), [part 2](http://onaperduamedee.tumblr.com/post/79590353258/meta-clara-boxed-girl-part-2),[part 3](http://onaperduamedee.tumblr.com/post/79590519934/meta-clara-boxed-girl-part-3).

This is part 2 of the whole post, discussing Series 9. For part 1, dealing with Series 8, go [here](http://impossiblyeclecticduck.tumblr.com/post/136509459191/between-one-heartbeat-and-the-next-the-liminal).]

[This is a rather long post.]

The motifs of containment, breaching of boundaries, and rebuilding of identity from the liminal area, continue to shape Clara Oswald’s character development in Series 9. While Series 8 represented Clara’s growing dominance over and creative use of her liminality, Series 9 shows the formation of her identity from the debris of Clara Oswald to the unprecedented, paradoxical entity who comes to be known as ‘Clara Who’. In Series 9, Clara dies again and again, paving the way for her resurrection and ultimate liberation. Moreover, Clara’s transformation is not limited to her alone, but, by virtue of her intimacy with him and their entwined identities, also extends to the Doctor. This series, Clara Oswald truly owns her liminality, gaining a mastery over it that she did not have previously, and one of her final acts is, once again, guiding the Doctor through a turbulent phase in his own life. I tried not to focus overmuch on individual details, but to study the character development as a whole.

The opening two-parter of the series,  _The Magician’s Apprentice_ / _The Witch’s Familiar_ , introduces us to the the shift in Clara’s position in universe, as well as the changed dynamic of Clara’s relationship with the Doctor. It is a fact established early on that Clara’s ties with her life on Earth, post-Series 8, have loosened radically. Her almost breathless transits from one place to the other in  _The Magician’s Apprentice_  - from her school to UNIT headquarters, from there to the Mediterranean cafe, then to a different point in time and space altogether, and again to Skaro, all point to her state of inordinate fluidity. Secondly, this episode also brings out a clear change in Clara’s functions. Clara in this episode is more than just an intermediary between the Doctor and the people of Earth, represented by UNIT, as she was in Series 8. Clara acts as a guide to the Doctor - a kind of high priestess of the inaccessible deity, speaking on behalf of and helping others find the Doctor, and acting as consultant for Kate and UNIT. She compels Missy to release the planes from stasis, and she is the one Missy approaches for assistance in finding the Doctor, in spite of the fact that Missy is a liminal figure, too.

Herein lies the trick - Missy is utterly comfortable with and fully aware of her liminality. But her status is very different from Clara’s. She can deal out death, and manipulate her situation between life and death, more easily than Clara, who is still bound by her mortality. Clara may be significantly more detached from her human lifestyle, but she is still contained within Earth, bound by her ‘ability to die’. Death is a fixed state for Clara: any attempt to impersonate or perform it risks her being permanently locked in that state. The complications arising out of this is explored in  _The Witch’s Familiar_. Clara falls - literally - in this episode, almost passing to her condition in Series 7, where she is not only trapped, but also initially unaware of it, and then unable to cross the boundaries of her space. She threatens to kill Missy, like in  _Death in Heaven_ , but her weapon is seized from her, marking the beginning of the trap. Prompted by Missy, she enters the shell of a dead Dalek in order to gain access for herself and Missy into the heart of Skaro - a planet that Missy claims has been ‘brought back’. By doing this, Clara puts herself in the fixed space of death, with dangerous consequences, as the Doctor, unable to recognise her, threatens to kill her. Her survival is ensured only by the Doctor’s actions in the past and the present - he is the one who frees her from her containment. Thus, the opening two-parter of the series reiterates the nature of Clara’s liminality by contrasting her with two equally liminal figures, the Doctor and Missy, and sets the reconstruction of Clara’s identity in relation with death as the theme to be explored for the rest of the series .

Death as a fixed state still binding Clara continues to be figure strongly in the subsequent episodes.  _Under the Lake_ / _Before the Flood_  multiplies the motifs of traps, stasis, transit, and death, in the form of spaceships with fatal inscriptions, suspended animation chambers, cages and corridors, all of which create a claustrophobic impression. Clara, like the Doctor and almost everyone else in the base, literally walks around during the entire two-parter episode with death contained within her. There are numerous instances involving Clara, corridors, and doors: she is either hiding behind a door, or guiding the ghosts down corridors and beyond a door and trapping them within, or struggling to communicate from beyond a locked door and a corridor filling up rapidly with water. Clara being trapped within the Faraday cage, running into the stasis chamber, etc., they are almost standard stuff by now (“Guys, look, this is how we roll”). But the point to note is that faced with a situation that threatens her liminality, Clara finds a substitute for herself, ordering Lunn to retrieve the small box that is her mobile phone, extending control over her environment through another person. Another thing to be noted is the magnetic writing on the spaceship wall: it could be the first instance in this series of inscriptions on a surface, organic or not, that signifies death being locked within the person experiencing it. We are told that it reworks the way in which live people function, essentially trapping them in a loop after death, where the dead perpetually repeat the words they have read, and serve to multiply and spread death. The loop is nullified only when the Doctor wipes the memories of those who had read that writing, including Clara. The ghosts in this episode are oddly liminal figures - they are dead, but not quite so, since their souls still move around the base, and they exhibit considerable intelligence in trying to use the base and its mechanisms against its surviving crew. However, in spite of their seeming liminality, the ghosts are actually fixed in death - they can act only within a very limited sphere, having set functions that they cannot stop performing, serving an alien who appeared to be dead for a time.

Clara having death contained in her takes a different form at the beginning of  _The Girl Who Died_ , as we find her drifting in space, running out of oxygen and with a predatory spider moving within her spacesuit. She acts as a facilitator throughout this episode, and prepares to resume this role in  _The Zygon Invasion_. However, she is rendered unconscious and trapped in a Zygon pod early on, and it is her struggle to manipulate events in spite of her containment - saving the Doctor from the airplane explosion, guiding him in her direction, and withholding enough information to delay the final decisions - that marks the beginning of  _The Zygon Inversion_. In  _The Zygon Invasion_ / _The Zygon Inversion_ , the process of building Clara’s identity takes a new direction. Contrasted with a separate character who usurps the physical dimension of her identity, Clara’s identity is detached from her body. Although her own body is suspended within the pod in a death-like state - the Doctor almost believes she has been killed already - she exploits her psychical detachment to manipulate her body double. The episode goes on to emphasize Clara’s legacy and identity in terms of her significance to the Doctor, which is independent of her physical condition. Her response is subtler - in that text message to the Doctor, she announces that she is conscious, not that she is alive and free - and she can effect immensely significant changes on physical reality in spite of her captivity. While entrapment is a definite disadvantage in this episode, Clara can breach the limits imposed on her in a wholly different way. But again, this breach is not complete - Clara has to submit partially to her physical incarceration, because physical death is still very much a reality for her.

 _Sleep No More_  continues with these motifs in the form of the sleeping pods, the cold storage, and in fact the whole space station, along with a small shift in the identities of the monsters - are the monsters those creatures that Clara names ‘Sandmen’, or the people who created and extolled the virtues of the sleep pods? Clara again acts as facilitator, as well as naming the creatures prowling about in the space station, and, interestingly, unlocking the TARDIS herself using the key she wore around her neck on a chain. This image of her opening the TARDIS herself makes a powerful statement as regards her liminal status. The TARDIS key hanging on a chain around her neck resembles a talisman, like emblems of mythical figures. It is a key, which highlights Clara’s ability to open and close doors and boundaries, and it’s almost a perfect emblem for a liminal character like Clara. Also, the fact that the key belongs to the Doctor’s TARDIS is a final statement of the intimacy between Clara and the Doctor before the beginning of the finale.

 _Face the Raven_  brings to the boil all the conflict building up throughout the series between Clara’s containment within her body, which is mortal and keeps being risked in almost every episode, and her growing poise within the liminal space and the associated functions which are underscored with each event. The almost-iconic image of Clara dangling out of the TARDIS mid-air, half in and half-out, captures that well early in the episode. Traps are aplenty here, as well as closed options: Clara and the Doctor can never return to the second most beautiful garden in the universe apparently because of Clara’s actions; the ‘trap street’ which is a refugee camp for aliens of different species, a massive liminal area bound by strict death-dealing rules; the stasis pod holding Anah; the trap set for the Doctor; and finally, Clara can never return to the TARDIS and her life of adventures, because of her own misinformed action. Over the course of the episode, the street, which starts out as a liminal area, becomes a container, and neither Clara nor the Doctor can leave it normally. The motif of the fatal inscription comes back in this episode with the deadly tattoo on the necks of those sentenced to death by Quantum Shade.

But the main problem about Clara’s identity arises as it did in  _The Witch’s Familiar_  - Clara cannot make decisions about the issuing of life and death. She functions as a guide, searching out hidden locations and guiding others there; she is positioned in the middle of fixed states such as life and death. When she takes upon herself the chronolock that was intended for Rigsy, she tries to contain that death within herself for a time, perform Rigsy’s mortality without committing herself to it. She does this without realising that she cannot cheat death, and that she already contains and is contained by her own mortality. In trying to save her friend’s life, she accidentally oversteps her boundaries and sinks into the fixed space of death, and this time, there is no escape for her. Clara fails at her liminality at this point. The most she can do, the only thing that makes a difference, is accept fully her mistake and her death as consequences of the choices she made. The final outcome of Clara’s identity, the one that she had been building since the end of last series, seems to be disintegration from the inside, and the black smoke flowing out of her mouth symbolises that collapse, as she is emptied of life and her shell falls to the ground.

Even so, Clara does not die entirely, as in, she exists as a marginal force throughout  _Heavensent_. Although the version of Clara we see in this episode is not actually her, but more like an echo who is contained within the Doctor’s mind, she maintains her presence through the Doctor. It is a demonstration of Clara’s identity independent of her physical death, as first shown in  _The Zygon Inversion_. This is a complicated situation, since Clara as the Doctor’s mental projection is animated by the Doctor’s own will and identity, and motivates him to do something that is indisputably the Doctor’s choice alone. The important point here is how Clara’s identity has fused with the Doctor’s, since they are both liminal figures, and their liminality is actually similar, which was not the case between Clara and Missy in  _The Witch’s Familiar_. Every lonely monster needs a companion, we have been told, but luckily for the Doctor, he had found another lonely monster just like him. Throughout this series, Clara and the Doctor have complemented each other’s actions and affirmed each other’s identities, to the extent that faced with the loss of Clara, the Doctor falls into an identity crisis (“What’s the point of being a Doctor if I can’t cure you?”) and refuses to give her up to death. Faced with the failure of Clara’s liminality, he loses faith in his own. To this end, his captivity within his confession dial has some oblique parallels to the motifs of containment and breaching of limits associated with Clara. For instance, the psychological element in the torture is somewhat similar to what happened in  _Last Christmas_ : dreams had been weaponised against him and Clara in that episode, and in this episode, the Doctor’s most deep-rooted nightmares have been weaponised against him (the Veil). In both cases, the physical manifestation of those dreams/nightmares cause actual death. There are more of such examples, but I will try not to crowd this discussion with too many details that do not directly concern Clara.

 _Hell Bent_  is a landmark episode in so many ways. It heightens the conflict between life and death, reconsiders the nature of death, presents a new perspective on the relationship between Clara and the Doctor, their similarities and their fused identities, and most importantly, Clara truly comes to life by the end of the episode. Clara’s containment is heavily focused on from her very beginning moments, and her challenged liminality. The trap street containing Clara in her final moments, within and at the end of her timestream, has been recreated within the extraction chamber. She steps out of her own timestream into the extraction chamber where the Doctor is waiting for her, in an arrangement that looks rather like a magician summoning a spirit from a different realm (compare this with  _The Magician’s Apprentice_ , where Clara locates using a laptop the Doctor headed to his death, asks for him on the castle ramparts, and the Doctor enters right on cue). She leaves the extraction chamber to run down a long corridor and into the elevator, then from the elevator directly into the Cloisters, described as ‘the Hell of the Time Lords’. She does not even enter the TARDIS, since it materialises around her, containing her neatly again. There is that moment when Clara steps right onto the closed service hatch and her presence draws the Doctor’s attention to it, but otherwise, Clara mostly moves straight from one containing space into another, her will dominated by the Doctor’s.

Containment being associated with disintegration and death for Clara, she has chiefly three direct encounters with death in this episode, and each time, she steps away from it. The first is, quite obviously, on the trap street, when she moves away from the Quantum Shade and into the extraction chamber. The second is when she faces the Weeping Angels and the Cyberman in the Cloisters; she can evade the Angels but the Doctor has to wrench her away from the Cyberman’s grasp. This points to a change in the nature of death: in the first case, death means complete obliteration of a person’s identity, especially in the physical aspect. In the second case, though, it is undying death: the Dalek, the Weeping Angels, and the Cybermen, are all bound by the cables - which are themselves somewhere between organic tentacles and inorganic steel cables - and fixed in place, not actually dead, but weakened and trapped for nearly all eternity. The Time Lords whose minds are contained within the Matrix, whose projections guard the Cloisters, are also integral to this netherworld. They are the ghosts inhabiting Hell, and since the dead do not suffer the living to pass, they attack Clara, who is inexplicably, anomalously suspended between life and death. So now, if we consider how Clara was able to distract, rebuke, and taunt the General and Ohila so successfully, apart from the fact that she knows how to command popular attention, it’s also because the Time Lords, whose immortality is essentially a hyper-extended lifespan and who flinch from liminal characters, are simply out of their depth here. They have no idea how to deal with a woman who is dead, undead, and yet not so.

This is because ultimately, the Time Lords cannot control or contain the Hybrid. The Hybrid, as we come to know, describes Clara and the Doctor. It describes their fused identities, but it can also describe them individually as liminal characters. The hybrid is supposed to be a blend of two different types which are fixed, determinable, and therefore safe in their lack of potential. It contains the characteristics of both types, but their fusion creates an entirely different creature who belongs to neither type or state, a paradox existing in a liminal zone, whose nature and actions can neither be accurately predicted nor be successfully stopped. As a being both dead and alive, Clara is far more invulnerable than she was before, and she is placed where the Time Lords would never go (the Cloisters).

The third time Clara faces death is inside the new TARDIS, and this is wholly different. This is death-in-life: the regressive, static future on Earth that she would be trapped within, the erasure of the experiences and memories that composes her identity. With no hope of growth, and her identity and liminality denied and negated, it would be absolute death for her. This is what the Doctor, blinded by his obsession to protect Clara at all costs, tries to push her into, not realising that Clara’s past self, her old identity, died a very long time ago, and in breaking out of this attempted containment, Clara’s new identity is finally completed and freed. Freedom of choice gives her the mobility she needs to become a truly liminal character.

This is one of the reasons why the ending scenes of  _Hell Bent_  are so satisfying in terms of character development, and also symbolically rich. The portrait of Clara as she used to be before her death crumbles and falls away, signifying the disintegration of all her past selves. Partially forgotten by the Doctor, she is free to create a new self which is not necessarily fused with his. She is animated by her pure will to reconstruct her life and identity from an eternal journey across time and space. Clara is now the master of her own fate, dominating the liminal space within which she functions. She opens and closes boxes at will, poised on the threshold of her very own TARDIS, choosing when and which side she wants to move to. She is suspended between life and death, deriving her immortality from that grey area which always has fuel for creativity and endless potential, and only she has the power to terminate it. As a ghost running on a time loop, similar to, and very different from, the ghosts in  _Under the Lake_ / _Before the Flood_ , she is now of the most basic, classic liminal figures known to us. We get a glimpse of her power within and over her liminality when she guides the Doctor one last time, bringing his TARDIS to him and restoring his identity while sitting in the penumbral region around her own TARDIS, before flying away across time and space. It is an end, in that it is not an end, and therein lies the magic.


End file.
